Another School Shooting

Another shooting; can we talk about the hidden problem?

This week, a mass shooting at a Canadian high school killed 9. It's time to talk about the hidden problem.

Fires don't hide from sprinklers. Tornados don't target shelters. But active shooters prepare, wait, and seek the best opportunity to attack. No matter how much we plan, the active assailant is counter planning. I remember the 1999 Columbine school shootings. In those days, shelter-in-place was not a term and police waited outside for SWAT to arrive. Now assailants seek hiding people and block doors.

The answer is uncomfortable…we must prepare for what we can't prevent. The cyber security industry went through a similar transition. Hackers got better than the firewalls meant to keep them out. Cyber experts now build active response systems that adjust to attacks in real time. Safety needs a similar transformation.

But what does that look like? Here are two practical steps:

1. Identify incidents faster, accurately, and with people. I sold detection systems for 15 years. There is no detection technology available that works well without human verification.  Even worse, false alarms destroy early detection in the following order:

   • They turn off noisy alarms
   • They turn off systems all together
   • People stop listening

   Quick crisis detection requires people talking to each other plus a way to  separate useful from non-useful information. Technology can help but ultimately this is still about training and equipping people to spot warning signs and know how and when to say something. Ultimately, humans are still the best detectors.
2. Give people good information to make better decisions during an incident. Humans were doing intelligence long before AI. With a little training and good real-time information, most people make good decisions. You can't act if you don't know what is happening and where. Mass notification is a start but not enough. Incidents are dynamic and fast changing. Information that was useful 5 minutes ago can be wrong now. Two way communication that manage extraneous or stale information is needed. This is much harder than it sounds particularly when clear leadership is not available. Only the largest cities and corporations have a security operations center. Everyone else has to just figure it out during an incident.

Prevention is good; but, we've reached the point where it's not enough. The cyber world is 95% computer so naturally their solution is 95% technology. But the safety world is 95% human. We can't ignore this. People are the responders. We need to do more to equip them to act during a crisis.